I loved browsing the emacsconf videos this year, really nicely presented, and such cool stuff happening. Still have lots to watch, but so far in particular the infrastructural and UI type stuff seemed amazing, there's loads happening! Favourites included:

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/casual/ -- Charles Choi designing UIs for human beings rather than octopuses (this jibe is meant fondly, I am a happy octopus)

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/literate/ -- Howard Abram, literate programming

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/gypsum/ -- Emacs and emacs lisp clone in Guile

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/rust/ -- Rune, an experimental Emacs core in Rust

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/julia/ -- lovely talk about the synchronicity between Julia and Emacs

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/guile/ -- Robin Templeton relaunches Guile-Emacs!

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/mcclim/ -- eh, this talk accepted questions from lambdaMOO?

What is better, from your experience?

I'm a happy Emacs user, but think having more options is great, and I've delved into some Common Lisp and certainly am eager to learn more. So I'm thrilled to see Lem continue to be developed.

Agree with the other responder, largely. I've been bothered a few times by Emacs locking up, but never enough to be actually upset about it. Bugs, I don't see it, it is very very solid for me, I can't remember the last time something didn't work as expected. Hmmm.

Still very Lem-curious, though!

Oh come on. Emacs is not that buggy. For a piece of software that's been developed for over forty years it's quite surprisingly stable. Most of the "bugs" I see are due to some tighter integration between different packages - someone upstream would change something that inadvertently breaks things somewhere else. It doesn't happen that often.

Also, Elisp isn't really that bad. Well, sure, Common Lisp of course is a lot nicer language, and of course, not having any good concurrency story doesn't add any points, still, Elisp isn't so horrendous.

That being said, I do really hope Lem would get traction, and people start building plugins for it. Alas, realistically I'm not sure how feasible that would be. Replicating anything like Org-mode, with tons of extensions may take many years. Lispers however are known for their tenacity and ingenuity, who knows, maybe it wouldn't take too long.

Concurrency is very important these days though. Yet it is an extremely hard to solve problem in Emacs, due to tons of mutable global state, ingrained for decades, very hard to convert to something that works OK when running concurrently.

I use Emacs every day. It is my editor and in general tool of choice. However, the longer the concurrency story is not improved, the more advantages do other projects accumulate, because this concurrency thing is part of everything. Even VSCode seems to be better at concurrency. What a shame.

I think the only way in Emacs to properly use multiple cores for speedup is to start external processes. Sometimes that is a natural thing to do. But one also needs to process the result of an external process. Say for example a huge git diff in a magit buffer. All that stuff needs to be rendered/fontified. Editor locks up. That's just really bad. And people discuss workarounds all the time, writing code with these limitations in mind, meaning, that this makes code more complex everywhere.

Great to see Netflix being derided, I instantly feel soothed.

One other curious and quite insufferable thing which exists now is when a show/movie/game will give an unmistakeable and unsubtle nod to some other bit of media or information, either from the show/movie/game itself, or some other show/movie/game/cultural artefact.

And the learned and informed modern-media-gooner who is "in-the-know" will go: "aaaaaaha!" and "oooooh, clever!"

How has this happened? How is it considered so substantive and sophisticated for a show to make surface-level nods to other media? Please, someone explain this phenomenon to me.

I think Rick and Morty do a good job ridiculing this trope, but it doesn't seem to have been effective at slowing the tide. When a movie or a rap song alludes to something outside of itself or makes a meta-comment about itself, or breaks the fourth wall in some way, people are titillated beyond belief, I find.

What exactly is tickling them so hard?

THE WIZARD WENT WEST THROUGH THE DOOR AND INTO THE GARDEN

Now you're really on to something - someone give this person some VC money, please!

Couldn't disagree more about Arcane, I thought it was the usual pedestrian writing and mish-mash of tired tropes we've come to expect from mainstream productions.

A friend was pushing me to give it a try, a friend who likes Marvel, and the Miles Morales spiderman film, who plays League, who was excited by Baldur's Gate, etc etc. I tried to say "no, there is no chance of me enjoying that, it'll be the usual drivel", but they insisted it was really good.

And I watched, against my better judgment, saying to myself: "come on now, give it a serious try, be open-minded". To no avail!

I recall the scene where they'd the punk or alternative or "underground" live music in the bar in the underworld place, in the 3rd or 4th episode, and that being the final straw for me. A viler and more disharmonious appropriation of dissident culture I've never had the displeasure of sitting through.

Sorry you didn't enjoy it. If I recall correctly, that scene was an animated cameo by Imagine Dragons who do the theme tune (Enemy) for Arcane.

Personally, I hadn't had any contact with League of Legends and knew none of the lore before watching Arcane, but was thoroughly taken with the incredible art and story-telling. What I find surprising is the amount of character development they manage to incorporate - the first season had meaningful character arcs for almost all the characters (maybe two side characters were left out). The second season feels a bit more rushed though.

A company wants to do action x.

"If x leads to legal issue y, how much could it cost us?"

"If x leads to reputational issue z, how much could it cost us?"

-- that's my guess for the two things that matter when a company considers an action. Aside from, of course, how much money or resources the action would bring to the table in the first place, which is the primary concern (legally, culturally, etc).

People who work in this and related and indeed any industry - am I off the mark? If so, how? Look forward to any clarifications or updates to this heuristic I'm proposing.

Yes, yes, yes and yes.

I hadn't explicitly said to myself that even for a modern company OpenAI maybe has a particularly fond relationship with this Orwellian use of language to mean its opposite. I wonder if we could go so far as to say it's a defining feature of the company (and our age).

Wow, excellent insight from these programmers. Very cool. Will be keeping this in mind!

Some people have a low bar for fun, for example, learning something new that connects to something they already knew, and saying to themselves, "Neat!"

No need to poke fun. I found it interesting. Among friends who are interested in AI it’s the kind of random fact you’d throw into conversation.

I didn't mean to poke fun, but I can see now that it triggered some pretty hard responses.

I should have attempted to be clearer - I specifically only meant to question the "fun" part. I didn't mean to suggest it's not a "good" fact, or a good "random" fact. Sure, it'd be great in a discussion as you describe.

Trying to think of some analogy to illustrate my point - imagine watching a movie, and someone says: "fun fact, actor xyz is also in movie abc." I, personally, would think: where's the fun part of this fact?

Fun facts need some oomph! Some surprising bit to them, something you wouldn't have seen coming. "Actor xyz showed up unannounced at my cousin's wedding for reason abc", would be a "fun fact".

Or you're listening to a Björk album with a friend, and half-way through he says: "oh, actually, fun fact, I once played on stage with Björk during a festival in Iceland", and he proceeds to launch into a few anecdotes.

Here, the fact was: "someone who wrote a seminal paper in AI is working in an AI company". I, personally, said to myself: oh, right. What's the surprise?

Apparently that was seen by some as an uncouth and uncultured reaction (not you though, you were very polite, hence my responding here). Oops.

One of the things I like about HN is the civilised discourse and your reply is a great example of that.

I get what you mean re the unexpectedness of a fact and level of fun, too. So thanks for explaining -- makes sense and I understand your original comment better :)

> to entertain a few friends during a sophisticated little soiree

Isn't this basically what (we'd like to think) HN is?

Minus food and drinks, and in-person interaction. It’s sad that joining a Teams/Zoom/* channel feels so much like work these days.

Maybe if we could make it feel more like house parties it’d work.

Did you get lost looking for the fantasy football subreddit or something?

The opposite of the fantasy football subreddit is probably moreso someone making minor specific side-points about language use and expecting others to read carefully, i.e. me in my initial comment, rather than the person misinterpreting them and making sarcastic remarks. Who, in actual fact, is probably more closely mimicking the behaviour of such subreddits.

It was an amusing remark though nonetheless, out of all of them it's the one that gave me a chuckle.

I responded to the general responses just above anyway, if you're interested.

try harder

you have friends?

Yes, thank you for asking